by Ben Austen
“How am I more fortunate?” Dolores asked, unable to stop smiling.
IN 1976, RICHARD J. Daley was visiting his doctor for a scheduled appointment. That morning he’d celebrated the opening of a new gymnasium in a white ethnic neighborhood in the city’s southeast corner, declaring, “This building is dedicated to the people of this great community. They’re making Chicago a better city, because when you have a good neighborhood, you have a good city, and this is a good neighborhood.” In the doctor’s examination room, Daley had a heart attack and died. He was seventy-four and had controlled the city as mayor for twenty-one years. During a week of closed-door meetings, the party leaders debated who would fill the vacancy, finally picking a Democratic machine loyalist named Michael Bilandic, a mild-mannered alderman and corporate lawyer from Daley’s Bridgeport neighborhood. “Mayor Bland,” as he was sometimes called, struggled to quell labor disputes with butchers, gravediggers, and musicians with the Lyric Opera. In the winter of 1979, just weeks ahead of the election for his first full term, a blizzard struck the city, nineteen inches of snow, and the “city that works” couldn’t even clear the streets. Bilandic was edged out by a challenger he’d fired from a job as head of the city’s consumer affairs division. Jane Byrne was Chicago’s first—and, as of 2018, still the only—female mayor.
Byrne ran as an anti-machine reformer, but she’d also served dutifully under Old Man Daley. The presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, in 1960, inspired her to get involved in local politics. Recently widowed with a baby daughter, Byrne was granted an audience with Daley in his fifth-floor office, and he instructed her to speak to her alderman. The code of the Chicago machine is often summed up by a koan uttered to a future US congressman and federal judge named Abner Mikva when he was twenty-two and trying to volunteer at his South Side ward office; the boss there removed the nub of his cigar long enough to spit out, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Although Byrne didn’t even know her alderman’s name, the Man on Five himself had sent her; she was given a job ringing doorbells. Four years later, Daley set her up in a government post, with the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, the local agency overseeing Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The money from Washington passed through her office before making its way to Cabrini-Green and other impoverished neighborhoods, so that every paycheck for every job funded by the Feds had the mayor’s name on it. Chicagoans needed to know that they owed their livelihood not to Johnson or his Great Society but to Daley. In Byrne’s memoir, My Chicago, she recalls Daley telling her, “When I appoint personally, that person is handpicked by me—and IS mine. You owe your loyalty directly to me; you answer only to me.” He later put her in charge of the Department of Consumer Sales, Weights, and Measures, Daley declaring that she would be the first woman to lead a big-city agency.
With Byrne as mayor, Cabrini-Green again dominated the news. The management-consulting firm Arthur Young and Company, hired to assess the lasting benefits of the millions spent on security there after the Severin and Rizzato killings, found that there were none. The firm cited unemployment as the most pressing problem, but noted that the CHA had pulled back on routine maintenance. When security cameras broke, they weren’t replaced. The number of maintenance workers at Cabrini-Green had been cut from nineteen, in 1977, down to just six. Hundreds of apartments were badly in need of repairs, but the agency, facing rising deficits, did little as conditions worsened. The vertical patrols started in 1971 that were supposed to send officers through every floor of each high-rise, securing the buildings from top to bottom, had devolved into do-nothing units. The officers stayed in their cars and never entered the high-rises. One officer admitted that they spent the nights mostly playing cards and watching TV: “Anything but serve and protect.” When Byrne officials showed up at Cabrini unannounced, they discovered that almost half the patrolmen assigned to the detail hadn’t bothered to come in for their shifts.
The overcrowding and growing unrest in the state prison system, as well as the attention it received from Dolores Wilson and other citizen and professional “prison problem consultants,” led Illinois governor James Thompson to initiate an early-release parole program. As a victory, it was a Pyrrhic one. Since Cabrini-Green and other beleaguered public housing developments in Chicago had vacancies, that’s where large numbers of ex-offenders were sent. These were people who needed shelter and a fresh start, but also required extensive guidance and counseling; parolees were supposed to be monitored and mentored. Congress had recently passed legislation giving those involuntarily displaced or in “substandard” living conditions greater access to public housing, and making it much harder for working-class families to secure a unit. The consequence of these well-intentioned policies, however, was that society’s dire problems were being dumped into neglected high-rise projects—it was less a solution than the making of a crisis. By 1981 there were seventy-seven former inmates with known gang affiliations paroled to Cabrini-Green from state prisons, another three hundred from the Cook County jail, and an impossible-to-determine number living there as squatters. Oftentimes criminals never even kept a Cabrini apartment, instead treating Cabrini-Green as a police-sanctioned vice district, a place to do their dirt before returning to wherever else they called home.
The number of parolees contributed to a crime wave at Cabrini. There were thirty homicides there from 1978 to 1981. In the first three months of 1981 alone, eleven people were murdered and thirty-seven others shot. That January, Cedric Maltbia, the Gangster Disciples chief known as Bo John who’d recruited Kelvin Cannon, was killed in a Cabrini high-rise. Two women, sisters who’d moved to Chicago from New York, had come to the building to shoot a man who’d beaten and robbed one of them. Bo John happened to be in the guy’s apartment, so the sisters shot him, too. With the Disciples leaderless, the fight for succession added to the mayhem. One of the ensuing killings occurred in the ground-floor rec room of 1230 N. Burling, Dolores Wilson’s new home. Thirty people had gathered there on a Monday night in March to hear a musical group, young men who called themselves the Electric Force Band. Junior Miller, who played bass in his father’s church, was on guitar. Jimmy and Ronnie Williams, who lived in a neighboring high-rise, played drums and keyboards. Demetrius Cantrell, whom everyone called Sugar Ray Dinke, for his boxing skills and diminutive size, had taught himself guitar by watching the old bluesmen on nearby Mohawk Street. The lead singer was a twenty-one-year-old named Larry Potts, who could sound like Frankie Lymon or Little Anthony. They covered radio songs, mostly funk and soul—Cameo, Rick James, Con Funk Shun. They played Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield, of course, giving the Cabrini legends their due. Because Hubert Wilson knew the young men from the Corsairs, his drum and bugle corps, he’d help them set up on the ramp or in an empty apartment. They might charge a quarter or fifty cents for people to come and listen. If it was hot out, they plugged in an orange extension cord, connected it to another one, and then another one, and played outside the building, turning the blacktop into a dance floor.
On that March night, Larry was singing when someone passing by outside stuck a .357 Magnum through an open window in the rec room and fired several times. A boy in the audience pushed Hubert Wilson to the ground and lay on top of him. One bullet hit a six-year-old in the right thigh, and another shot ricocheted off a wall and struck a fourteen-year-old girl in the leg. Both children would be okay. Larry Potts was shot through the back, and died that night at a North Side hospital. The shooter, a twenty-four-year-old named Jerry Lusby, a Cobra Stone from 1150 N. Sedgwick, on the other side of Division Street, told police that he mistook the singer for a rival gang member.
The next morning as Mayor Byrne was getting ready for work, drinking coffee and putting on makeup, she heard on the radio the news of the singer’s death. Not his name or who he was. The reporter simply broadcast that there’d been another killing at Cabrini-Green. Byrne lived on the forty-third floor of a luxury high-rise less than a mile east of Cabrini. She could look out her wind
ow on the Gold Coast and see the housing project’s palisade of red and white towers. When Byrne’s grandfather emigrated from County Mayo, Ireland, to Chicago, in 1888, the first place he lived was in Little Hell, the Irish ghetto that was the future site of Cabrini-Green. Her grandfather’s older brother, who’d made the journey four years earlier, warned him to stay clear of the gangs that terrorized the neighborhood. A century later, gangs there were still causing havoc. Byrne decided that as mayor she was obligated to do something about the violence. And a week later, she announced that she would take up residence at Cabrini-Green. “I will keep that Cabrini-Green apartment in the way that many suburbanites keep a downtown or in-town apartment,” she said. “I will consider it as a place to go on some nights and not on others. I will not give up the apartment so long as I am mayor.”
She picked as her new home what she’d heard was the most troubled of all the high-rises, the building where Larry Potts’s killer lived, 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick, the Rock. When the building’s manager started showing apartments to Byrne’s advance team, the first “vacant” unit he opened had a family living in it. He used his keys on a second officially empty apartment. Unofficial occupants lived there as well. By then the overall population at Cabrini-Green had fallen from a high of somewhere around 20,000, in the 1960s, to 14,000. But the housing authority estimated that another 6,000 people likely stayed there who weren’t on a lease. The head of the CHA guessed that 300,000 lived in the city’s public housing, more than double the official count and a tenth of Chicago’s total population.
A reporter who visited the high-rise before the arrival of the mayor’s cleaning crew described the fresh urine pooled in one of the two elevators, the graffiti covering the walls—“Disciples Kills all Stones”—and the fear he felt in the narrow corridors and stairwells. The toilets were out of order in the lobby. The screen door on the mayor’s new fourth-floor apartment was punched in and lolling off its hinges. Second graders at Cabrini-Green’s Byrd Elementary—a school created to relieve overcrowding at Jenner—sent letters to Byrne urging her to stay away: “A lot of black people live here and you are a white person”; “Roaches and rats might drive you crazy”; “You may be shot, stab or assassinated.” In 1978, Byrne had married Jay McMullen, a city hall reporter with the tippling insouciance of an emcee at a Dean Martin roast. When McMullen first visited the Rock, the elevator taking him up to his apartment broke down, stranding him and eleven others between floors. When freed, he walked the four flights, the light bulbs missing in the stairwells, trash piled up around the garbage chutes at each landing. “It ain’t the Ritz,” he told the reporters with him, but he wasn’t too worried. “I’ve slept in some pretty unusual places in my life.”
The couple moved in on March 31, 1981, arriving in a limousine and hurried inside by a security detail of sixteen. The apartment next to Byrne’s was cleared so that two guards were stationed nearby at all times. Bulletproof glass panels were installed on her windows. President Reagan had been shot the day before, in an attempted assassination. Byrne had received death threats as well. “While I was mostly philosophical about such threats,” Byrne wrote in a diary of her stay that was published in the Sun-Times, “Jay was grimly humorous, stating, ‘You’ll be safer in Cabrini. The place has such a bad reputation most assassins will be afraid to go there.’” She added, “And now it is our pleasure to take turns using a hand shower that our guards attached to the bathtub faucet. They don’t live very fancy here at Cabrini.”
Byrne was engaged in a brazen political stunt, a ploy to jump-start declining poll numbers midway through her first term. She’d won the black vote over Bilandic, but once in office she’d reduced the number of African Americans in key civic positions. She’d installed a black interim police chief but given the permanent job to Richard Brzeczek, a white veteran of the force. She removed two of the five African Americans on the eleven-member school board, replacing them with whites who were openly opposed to desegregation through bussing. Byrne had pivoted, hoping to shore up support among whites, but the backlash was fiercer than she expected. In Chicago’s zero-sum racial politics, each of these moves was treated as a declaration of war. Relocating to one of the country’s most infamous black ghettoes would demonstrate that she cared about issues affecting the African American community.
As political theater, it was compelling stuff. Byrne was a small woman, heavily rouged, with a blond bob and a mouth that seemed perpetually pursed with nervousness. She was partial to mink coats, ruffles, and pastels. The local and national news ran with the story of this tough Irish woman living in the notorious housing project. She was like Kurt Russell’s character in that year’s Escape from New York, entering the ruins of the postapocalyptic city, except she wore a purple suede jacket and a pink skirt. “Mrs. Byrne is crossing the invisible but powerful line which has always separated the haves from the have-nots,” wrote the Defender. “It is a stunt whose redeeming political symbolism elevates it to the lofty heights of civic and moral responsibility.”
To her credit, Byrne understood the practical effect the media attention would have on Cabrini-Green. She occupied the seat of power, and she could bring that power with her to public housing. “Wherever a mayor goes, there seem to be city services galore,” she said. Once there, she launched a sports initiative for the thousands of local youth, beginning construction on three new baseball diamonds and a football field on the site of the shuttered Cooley High School. Two other parks received upgrades. Potholes were filled and cars towed. Workers from the city’s streets and sanitation department swept gutters and picked up trash. Sod was planted (but it all died). Sewers were repaired. Plumbing and heating systems in the buildings received upgrades. Byrne created a new food cooperative at Cabrini. She sent staffers from Human Services into the high-rises to counsel truants, work with victims of crimes, and help alleviate domestic conflict. Seven area liquor stores were closed, the city citing them for a range of electrical or structural violations, and hundreds of families were evicted, some for illegally housing parolees suspected of gang activity. Byrne opened a new misdemeanor court at a nearby police station to hear what was expected to be a torrent of new cases. A retired army major general, who’d commanded the Green Berets, was given the position of directing all security at Cabrini. A special task force of fifty federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was assigned to stop the trafficking of guns there. For the 150 Chicago cops who participated in a Sunday raid of the purportedly vacant apartments at Cabrini-Green, she gave each of them white envelopes with $50 inside, money from her political fund, instructing them to treat their wives or girlfriends to a nice meal; Byrne also awarded $800 to six officers who solved a Cabrini murder. Police crowded the streets; firemen and paramedics entered the towers without fear. More work went on at the housing project in two weeks than had occurred in the previous two years.
Byrne’s Cabrini sojourn led every TV newscast; slightly different installments appeared in the morning- and late-edition newspapers. The Sun-Times ran daily opinion polls: “Will Mayor Byrne’s Cabrini-Green move make a difference?” “If you were Mayor Byrne, would you move into Cabrini-Green?” The city council passed a resolution praising her decision to take an apartment there, and other city politicians announced their own intentions to stay in public housing. When New York City mayor Ed Koch was asked if he, too, would consider a similar move, he said he’d grown up poor and had no desire to go back.
“Rumors, roaches, rats and gangs are the curse of Cabrini,” Byrne wrote in her Sun-Times diary. She mused on the subject of the cockroach, how she’d developed the reflex to sweep walls and let faucets run before using them, so much so that when she left town on business, spending a night at a luxury hotel in Manhattan, she found herself doing the “cockroach check.” “Did you remember to pack the Raid, dear?” her husband asked drolly. She recounted going to bed to the CBS Evening News, just as she and Jay did most nights, though now they were in a Cabrini-Green bedro
om and Walter Cronkite was talking about them. In one diary entry, Byrne described standing at her apartment window as white joggers waved and blew her kisses from Division Street: “It was like seeing the first robin in the spring. We hope more will come by and not be afraid.” A poll found that 60 percent of Chicagoans would vote for her if the election were held then, with 27 percent saying her Cabrini stay changed their vote. Two-thirds of those interviewed felt she was trying to solve problems at Cabrini-Green, and nearly three-quarters thought the move sincere.
In many struggling sections of Chicago that were not Cabrini-Green, community leaders couldn’t comprehend why the city was funneling its scant resources into a single seventy-acre plot of land. There were dozens of other public housing developments in the city, and numerous neighborhoods in need of services and revitalization, most of them without the advantage of being a few blocks from the mayor’s Gold Coast home. Many Cabrini-Green residents also resented Byrne’s presence. They accused her of creating a police state; residents reported being stopped and frisked five times whenever they walked from a building to the corner grocery. Hundreds were arrested, almost all for misdemeanors, with just about every case eventually dismissed. Elax Taylor, who’d operated the 911 Teen Club in the basement of his high-rise for decades, received an eviction notice because his seventeen-year-old son was found with marijuana. Even Police Superintendent Brzeczek admitted that his officers were treading a “very, very fine line between maintaining order and becoming oppressive.”
The activist Marion Stamps was especially vocal in her criticisms of the mayor. Her community center, Tranquility-Marksman, sat across Division Street from Byrne’s new apartment, and she had a close relationship with the families in 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick, the young men even bestowing on her the honorific “Mama Stone,” for the support she’d given youngsters who later became Cobra Stones. Stamps was a short thirty-five-year-old with a round, expressive face, often framed in oversize oblong glasses. But with her bullhorn voice and intensity, she gave the impression of someone of much larger stature. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1945, and as a girl she picketed the segregated public library that wouldn’t lend her books. Medgar Evers lived close by, and the civil rights leader trained her as an organizer. When she was seventeen, she moved to Chicago, and in 1965 she landed an apartment in the 1230 N. Burling building. Public housing, she said, was “a godsend, a blessing, compared to the slum housing I was living in before. For me the move to Cabrini-Green represented something bigger and better.” It was also a place, she would say, where “social workers question your man- and womanhood and think nothing of it. Politicians make promises of jobs and welfare checks for your votes, or no jobs and no welfare check if you don’t vote the way the precinct captain has dictated. Then we have Chicago’s finest, the police who only serve and protect property and property rights.” She blamed the “street organizations” as well, “the misguided black folks among us who sell dope to our children, who intimidate and force our children into gangs.”
